Over the past century, the telephone has become an ubiquitous device used by the vast majority of humans across the planet. Telecommunications networks and other infrastructure have developed to support the mass communication between people. Over the last few decades, interconnectivity has increased and mobile phones and now smart phones are prevalent.
Also prevalent are advertisements and telemarketers who make incessant phone calls to potential or actual customers. With the great decrease in cost of phones and calling, the pace of telemarketing has increased. Further, telemarketers are not geographically bound to the region of their callees. Indeed, India and other English-speaking countries with cheap labor costs have increased the range of telemarketing substantially.
Concomitant with the rise in telecommunications capabilities is the enormous increase in automation, e.g., robocalling. Automated calls are employed in numerous contexts, such as politics and local government, but telemarketing usages prevail. The advantages of these calls for telemarketers are manifest, but the annoyance factor to those receiving unwanted calls, whether automated or live, is quite large. Prior art techniques to combat these calls are not adequate to interdict them, i.e., the robocalls tend to get through to the victims, whose only recourse is to hang up.
There is, therefore, a need for an improved technique to interdict unwanted calls, particularly robocalls, which preserves the normal functioning of the phone, and handles the undesired calls before ringing and disturbing the callee.